Buy Containment: The Zombie Puzzler

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About This Game

Containment: The Zombie Puzzler is an action puzzle game like you’ve never seen before. The goal of Containment is to surround zombies with survivors of the same color. But watch out for the zombies—they'll fight back by infecting the survivors in the street. Through the game's pulse-pounding campaign and multiple survival modes, you'll use your wits, items you find you along the way, and even the town around you to contain the zombie outbreak.

Key Features:

Not a Match 3 In Containment, you don’t match three of anything—you eliminate zombies by surrounding them with survivor tiles.

These Tiles are Alive Each tile is a fully animated character that interacts not just with its fellow survivors and zombies, but also with the environment.

Unique Storytelling There's no time for cutscenes or dialog boxes when the undead are trying to eat you—the story of Franklin County and its survivors is told through in-world text as you make your escape through what's left of the city.

Real-Time/Turn-Based Containment combines the cerebral strategy of a puzzle game with all the real-time action you'd expect from a zombie attack.

WMD’s Playing the game well rewards you with useful items that you can use against the zombie horde to devastating effect.

The Environment is Your Friend Franklin itself becomes a weapon as you knock over signs, power up heavy cranes, and roll cars over zombies.

Boss battles Yeah, that’s right. We even have boss battles. You haven’t seen zombies like these before.

Games are great, I love them all, from hard core strategy through to frantic FPS action, but if I had to pick my least favorite genre.... well... it’s like asking a parent who their least favorite child is, it’s not an easy question to answer and you’ll almost certainly get the generic “I love them all equally” reply.

That’s the easy way out; the problem is that it almost certainly isn’t true.

Gaming Bones

Deep down we know the answer, even if we don’t want to admit it to ourselves, but I’ll be brave, I’m going to take a stand for absolute honesty.

My least favourite genre is probably the puzzler, that’s not to say that I haven’t sunk plenty of hours into playing them over the years, but they just don’t grab me like other genres do.

They’re just too shallow, too casual, they’re fine for killing time on my phone or tablet during a commute but when I’m at home and looking for a gaming fix it’s rare that you’ll find me sitting in front of my PC playing Peggle or Tetris.

That’s not to say that I don’t enjoy puzzlers, but when I’ve got the gaming itch and enough time to indulge it properly, I like a little more meat on my gaming bones.

Monster Connoisseur

Monster movies are great; I love them all, from werewolves and vampires through to undersea kraken and outer space aliens, but if I had to pick my absolute favourite movie monster genre, it’d have to be zombies

I’ve exposed myself to so much zombie culture over the years that I can’t walk through a shopping centre or mall without thoughts of Dawn of the Dead playing through my mind.

Could the undead break through those glass doors? How long would the cakes and cookies in Starbucks stave off my hunger? Would I really be lucky enough to be in a mall when the zombie apocalypse strikes?

These are the sorts of questions that keep me up at night but rarely do I have the same thoughts about other supernatural beasties. If I’m out at night and there’s a full moon, I don’t check my pockets for silver bullets.On the rare occasion that I’ve seen a bat, I don’t reach for the crucifix and the garlic.

Werewolves and Vampires don’t stalk my waking thoughts but zombies... the “what if” of the undead apocalypse is always there, shambling beneath the surface of my mind.... but enough of my problems...

Apathetic Fanatic

Seemingly random questions at the start of reviews are great, but why am I sharing my aversion to puzzle games and my unhealthy zombie obsession?It’s because these particular personal preferences have presented me with a dilemma.You see I’m about to play through a game called “Containment”, a zombie themed puzzler which means I should both love it and be completely disinterested at the same time...

Survival Flavour

Containment certainly takes an interesting twist on the puzzle genre, instead of having colourful gems, blocks, fruits etc. to play with, here your puzzle pieces are zombies and survivors.The survivors themselves come in various different flavours from chainsaw wielding punks to gun toting cops.Each level presents you with a block of these survivors and some zombies mixed in for good measure. If you do nothing the zombies will infect the survivors around them, turning them into zombies too!

This encourages you to play through quickly, spend too much time mulling over your decisions and your group of survivors will turn into a shambling horde, so expect some frantic and rushed decision making as you play.

Shuffle Around

The game mechanic itself is a fairly simple one, you swap the positions of the different survivors by clicking on them, and your goal is to reposition the survivors in such a way that a zombie is surrounded by the same survivor type.

So if you’ve got a zombie that already has a couple of redneck survivors standing next to it, you’d quickly want to scan the closest survivors for more rednecks, if there are some close by, you’d start clicking on them to slide them into position around the zombie.As soon as our red necked buddies have the walker surrounded, they’ll take it down.That’s one less to worry about, time to move on to the next.It’s a simple rinse and repeat formula that makes this, like most other puzzle games, quick to learn, initially addictive but ultimately a little repetitive.

Touches

There are lots of nice touches in Containment.Different survivors have different attack animations when they take down a zombie, it’s a fairly simple thing, but this variation really does add to the experience, you’ll find yourself looking forward to taking a zombie out with a group of survivors you haven’t “experienced” yet.

When you complete a level, instead of the screen fading to black then loading in the next challenge, the camera will move away from your last victory and rush through the city until it focuses on the next group of survivors waiting for your point and click salvation.

Migraine Free

With regards to the aesthetics, it’s refreshing to play a puzzler that isn’t all bright primary coloured eye candy and flashing lights.Containment knows its setting and has a palette appropriate for its post apocalyptic theme.Everything is pretty good looking too in its own top down, mostly static kind of way.

This isn’t just any puzzle game...

This is a refreshing entry into the genre and one which I enjoyed a lot more than I thought I would.It avoids the migraine inducing bright cheeriness which infects most other puzzlers, it’s gritty, it gives a nice “end times” vibe and if you’re in the mood it can be genuinely fun to play.

Is it the sort of game that will make me want to rush through my working day to get back home and play?

No, puzzle games don’t do that for me, too shallow, remember, but it is a fun distraction in short bursts and one which I’ll definitely load up again.

This is a post apocalyptic puzzle game.

If puzzle "match up" games are your thing and you’re looking for something a little different in the genre, then Containment should fit the bill.It’s a stylish, quick hit, post apocalyptic puzzler and there aren’t many games you can say that about!

( To view the full review (and others) please take the time to visit review-well.com

If you like matching games and if you like zombies, then this game is for you. The premise is very simple but the gameplay is very fun. I love killing zombies, but sometimes I don't feel like running around to do it. This game is an interesting puzzler. I enjoy this as a casual game to rest my brain from all my all pointing and clicking :). There is a sense of urgency since the zombies can kill the survivors, turning them into zombies. With each map, the only soundtrack you get is a pulsing heart, which hightens the sense of "must kill them all before I have too few survivors!". Using certain survivors to kill zombies will cause loot to fall. You can have bio-suits, missiles, grenades, lightning bolts, and mystery items to help you fight. This game is worth the price and it is an enjoyable little game.

Essentially it is a flash game, an enjoyable variant similar to the Candy Crush type game if you've ever played it, that will provide around 5-20 hours of fun. At its core its a puzzle game with strong elements of strategy.

The premise of the game is that you have to surround groups of zombies with the same type/coloured survivor to remove them from play. Survivors consist of the soldier, the policeman, the cheerleader and the thug, each providing a different voiceover when a group is cleared which is quite nicely done.

There is one 5 act/20 level campaign which should take you around 5 hours to complete. The learning curve is very well done which is good as there is only one difficulty setting.

A range of harder zombie types provide the bulk of the challenge is this game as you progress through the campaign. The simplistic gameplay is added to with environmental hazards that can kill off survivors or block more of them from coming through to reinforce the game board. Additionally you can have up to three power-ups to blast away groups of zombies when in a tight sequeeze. There are around 6/7 each individually adapted to provide a unique destructive effect when used.

There are three additional survival levels that you can play if you get hooked while the soundtrack is very basic.

If you are an achievement hunter it should take you between 14-20 hours in total to get the last one, as its a grinder!

Overall Id say the game does what it says in the store page. Its nothing special but it is enjoyable if you like this sort of game, as I have. If you are a hardcore game then this is probably not for you unless you like a dose of casual on the side!

Another zombie game, you're thinking? Well, no, not really. At least, not a TYPICAL zombie game by any means.

As the title states, it's a puzzler - no hybrid zombie shooter-♥♥♥-puzzler. Just a puzzler. So why the zombie inclusion? For the most part, it's not relevant really at all. It could be anything that takes the place of those zombies, but the important thing is it's a pretty good puzzler.

It's based on the "match 3" style of puzzle, and you start with a full grid of objects/zombies (a bit like Bejeweled) - and just like Bejeweled, once you clear a group, the spaces are refilled. That's about where similarities end.

Your basic aim is to clear the zombies on the board, and the way you clear a group is to surround them with a colour-coded group of your little guys, doing their utmost against the contagion (go little guys!) As the game progresses, slight variations and hurdles are introduced to up the ante. Difficulty is kept nicely linear, and paced just right. I could go into deeper description of these hurdles, but I think doing so would rather spoil it for you. There's not much else to say about the mechanics - it does what it should rather well indeed.

The levels are tied together in a "story mode" format, and to be frank, the story is pretty rubbish, and terribly amateurly written. However, as this is in the form of text on-screen, there's no awful voice acting to listen to, and it skims along quickly enough, so that you soon progress onto the next level with a minimal of fuss. In short, you can easily ignore it, and it impacts the game in no other way than this.

So, even if you've completely had your fill of the over-used zombie craze, this is a worthy purchase, especially if "matching" puzzles are your thing. I picked it up in an indie bundle and was pleasantly surprised - so much so that I replayed it as soon as I'd finished the story mode. It's not exactly very graphically intensive either, so a moderate/low PC should run it capably too.

All in all a pleasant little puzzler that very much does it's own slant on a formula, and well worth the purchase. As always my metric is price, and I'd say this is worth a good £6-7. If you aren't so into puzzles, then I'd still recommend it, although you should adjust the price accordingly.